On Screens

A New Kind Of Memory

I came across a 1980’s themed TikTok account yesterday and scrolled it for over an hour. It gave me a sensation that I liked but hated, one that I could only stand a little of, but wanted more of. It was like touching a mildly electrified fence.

The account, called Rerun 80’s, just shows videos of objects from the 1980’s. that’s it. A Betamax copy of Big Trouble in Little China. Transformers. Trapper Keepers. A Fat Boys Cassette being slipped into a Panasonic Boom Box. A rotary phone. It creates nostalgia by focusing on the tactile memory of the objects that you interacted with regularly if you grew up during that time.

Childhood is a dream and the farther away you get from it the more dreamlike it becomes.

It’s not that it was new to remember my childhood. I just finished a memoir where I typed seemingly endlessly about the events that transpired from 1981 to 1992. I dreamt about them, thought about them while I was doing dishes, walking around the block, watching television. But in my writerly hands, the memories were just memories, collections of words transformed into stories. “When I was eight I moved….” “In 5th Grade, my teacher…” My job as a writer is to find words for memories, which means that memory for me is structured like a sentence — diagramed and complete — a thing that I bring from a state of ineffability and into something palpable, something I can manage and explain. In this way writing is an act of destruction. You capture a thing and freeze it. Like a 19th…